Last Friday my daughter's school held an end-of-term fancy dress day with a medieval theme, to mark the project on castles they'd been doing for the last few weeks. My daughter dressed up in her blue Cinderella gown, offset by some early-Lily-Allen-esque trainers. When we got to school the boys were got up as, variously, knights, archers, even a dragon. Apart from a couple of acrobats, the girls were almost exclusively dressed like my daughter.

Coincidentally, this was the same day that an internet spat was bubbling up over the New York Times review of HBO's lavish adaptation of George RR Martin's fantasy epic Game of Thrones, showing in the UK on Sky Atlantic. The NYT's Ginia Bellafante didn't particularly like the first episode of Game of Thrones – but that isn't what primarily exercised the legions of fans who've been looking forward to this adaptation of the first book in the US writer's mammoth A Song of Ice and Fire cycle. No: what got the internet going was Bellafante's assertion that "Game of Thrones is boy fiction patronisingly turned out to reach the population's other half."

She seemed to be referring to what she imagined was the shoehorning of a bit of nookie into the screenplay (although in fact the source material has plenty of bonking) in order to attract a female audience. "The true perversion ... is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies," she writes, "out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr Martin's, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to The Hobbit first."

You can kind of see where Bellafante got her ideas from: even the most outdated stereotypes have a grain of truth in them somewhere, and maybe there are more than a couple of loners with creases ironed in the front of their trousers who spend their Saturday nights painting lead figurines of orcs. But to stick so blinkeredly to such a generalisation, especially in a review for the New York Times, smacks of a lack of research. A cursory glance of the blogosphere shows there are many female fantasy fans: some of the most vocal UK ones are Liz de Jaeger at myfavouritebooks, Amanda Rutter at floor-to-ceiling-books, and Un:Bound team-member Adele Wearing.

And if anyone thinks that little girls wanting to dress as princesses while boys dress as knights is evidence for a kind of gender inevitability, think again. Girls wanting to be knights isn't a signifier of equality; princesses becoming more kick-ass is. Despite Ginia Bellafante's misguided comments in her review, the growing numbers of modern female fantasy fans might suggest that the genre is heading in the right direction.